SuccERP: The design science based integration of ECS and ERP in post-implementation stage

Abstract

The existing studies of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are primarily focusing on the adoption and implementation stages, the post-implementation stage has received less attention in comparison. However, most enterprises have been struggling under the post-implementation stage. This work aims to review the state-of-the-art issues of ERP in the post-implementation stage, including communication, legacy system, collaboration, and the manager is hard to monitor the performance. Based on the Design Science (DS) method, we highlight how to offset the lack of an ERP system and ECS according to the guidelines of DS, and show the exhaustive steps for implementing the artifact-SuccERP. Our research is rigorous and interpretive by considering the steps of the DS and the functions of Software Engineering. Further, we explore multiple ERP systems to summarize the difference in authentication, initial data, and specific procedures aspects, after that, we consider the two most popular procedures (order creation and bill of purchase creation) as examples to demonstrate and evaluate the proposed artifact—SuccERP in the result. We propose the complete and practical research for solving the issues from previous theoretical results of an ERP, and to show experimentally that the proposed SuccERP is easy to maintain by applying the Cyclomatic Complexity and the Maintainability Index as metrics. This study is a milestone that allows ERP research to move from the theoretical stage to integrating, creating things that serve a human purpose, and dealing with the issues presented by previous works practically.